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When at last we were up in front of the cameras, I remained as quiet as possible throughout the press conference and allowed Tajbakhsh to do most of the talking. We both concluded by saying how sorry we were to have made mistakes and asked Khamenei to forgive us. Afterward, Tajbakhsh and I gave our shirts back and put on our prison uniforms. We exchanged sorry looks. We were two broken men.

I was separated from Tajbakhsh and led back to the car that would take me back to prison. I hadn’t named any names. I knew what awaited me.

· · ·

A short time later, I sat quietly in my chair in the interrogation room. Rosewater walked over to me. From beneath my blindfold, I could see that he still had his formal shoes on. He stood in front of me for a while, then walked away. Then I could feel him standing behind me. He punched my shoulder so hard that I immediately felt my right hand go numb.

“You will be executed within the next twenty-one days,” he said. I knew that twenty-one days from now was the start of the holy month of Ramadan, during which Muslims fast and no execution can be carried out.

Rosewater punched my shoulder again. I could feel the impact of his ring on my bone. “I will make sure you die before Ramadan, Mazi,” he said. He stood in front of me and grabbed my nose with his fingers. “But I will also make sure that I smash your handsome face first.”

Chapter Fifteen

It was a hot early August day, and we were in one of the interrogation rooms where there was no air-conditioning. That always put Rosewater in a bad mood.

His first question surprised me: “Who is Pauly Shore?”

Those unfamiliar with Mr. Shore are not missing much. He’s a B-list actor who played a high school outcast, a college party animal, and an unemployed male stripper in a series of comedies in the 1990s. I, along with ten other pathetic souls, was a member of the Pauly Shore Alliance on Facebook. I had joined the group with a friend, as part of an inside joke.

“Why?” I replied.

Up to that day, except for the Daily Show interrogation, Rosewater had asked me only about politicians and journalists. He placed a piece of paper in front of me. At the top he had written Describe your connection to Pauly Shore. “I want to know everything there is to know about him.”

Where does one start? I wrote down that Shore is a comedian and was in a series of comedies I had watched while at university. I named a few of his films: Encino Man, Son-in-Law, and Jury Duty.

“Everyone you know seems to be a comedian,” Rosewater said. “We’ll investigate this Pauly Shore.” I wondered which lucky fellow in the Revolutionary Guards would be assigned that crucial task.

Rosewater wasn’t finished. “What is your connection to Anton Chekhov?” Despite its absurdity, I’d sort of expected this question. I was a member of two fan clubs on Facebook: Pauly Shore’s and Anton Chekhov’s. My inquisitors were really grasping at straws here.

“Anton Chekhov is dead, sir,” I answered. “He was a Russian playwright who lived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.”

“Was he a Jew?” Rosewater asked angrily.

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“He sounds like a Jew to me,” he said impatiently.

“Well, in Russian, ov denotes belonging to a place. It is similar to zadeh in Persian.”

Rosewater was silent.

“But I don’t know. He could be Jewish. Many Russian writers and intellectuals, as well as revolutionaries, were Jewish at that time.”

“And many of them were Zionists. Herzl was a Russian,” Rosewater said, referring to Theodor Herzl, the founder of the Zionist movement.

“He was Hungarian,” I replied and immediately regretted it. I didn’t want to sound defiant, but sometimes his idiocy was too much to bear. And anyway, at this point, what did I have to lose?

“Oh, really?” He grabbed my neck from behind and squeezed with all his might. “You know so much about the Jews, don’t you?”

He put a blank piece of paper on my chair and slapped the back of my head. “Write down everything you know about Anton Chekhov and don’t write